Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of patient operated medical diagnostic devices that can be used to determine if a patient is following health care provider medication recommendations.
Description of the Related Art
Patient non-adherence to health care provider mediation recommendations is a major medical problem. Center for Disease Control (CDC) materials suggest that between 20-30% of medication prescriptions are never filled, and medication is not taken as prescribed in up to 50% of all cases.
For example, studies have shown that only about 51% of patients being treated for hypertension are adherent to their medication therapy on a long term basis. In this context, “long term” should be viewed as being about six months, since other studies have shown that medication adherence rates drop off after the first six months of treatment. This is a large scale problem. At present over 133 million Americans have a long term chronic condition requiring medication.
It has also been estimated that medication non-adherence can result in up to 125,000 excess deaths annually; also incurring economic costs (due to higher subsequent patient expenses) estimated at $100 billion to $300 billion dollars per year.
Thus methods to monitor and encourage patent adherence to prescribed medications are of high interest in the art. Patient adherence to hypertension medication is particularly critical.
Patients, in particular elderly patients, are often put on multiple different medications at the same time. For example, to control hypertension, patients may be put on various combinations of diuretics, angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), beta-blockers, vasodilators, calcium channel blockers, aldosterone antagonists, renin inhibitors, alpha blockers, and the like. No one drug alone may be totally effective, but in combination, several drugs may produce the desired results.
Patients with other types of disorders, such as lung disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, epilepsy, diabetes, and the like are of course not immune to hypertension. Many of these patients, sometimes in addition to anti-hypertension drugs, also take additional types of drugs for these disorders. It is not uncommon for these other drugs to also have an impact on cardiovascular system function as well.
In order to improve patient medication adherence, the patient should ideally receive frequent feedback that would promptly warn the patient whenever the patient is not adhering to their prescribed medication properly, or when this medication has otherwise become less than fully effective.
A few such patient operated medical diagnostic tests are presently on the market, such as home blood glucose tests, home blood pressure tests, home pulse oximeters, and even home ECG tests.
With the exception of home tests for blood glucose, there are presently few home diagnostic tests that can warn a patient when he or she is out of compliance for a particular medication. Here prior art home blood pressure tests illustrate the problem—if a patient's blood pressure is non-ideal, is this because the patient skipped one of several anti-hypertensive medications that the patient has bee taking, or is it simply because the patient is having a bad day? If the patient skipped a drug, which one was skipped?
Thus further improvements in the art of using patient operated medical diagnostics to monitor patient adherence to medication would be desirable.